Mmm… Tetris Blocks

So here’s a render of the Tetris blocks I threw together. It’s kind of funny that sometimes the simplest objects are the most beautiful. (Ahem!) They bring back good memories of a great game (and most all the versions since).

Tetris Boredom

So I got bored at work yesterday and started to play around with creating objects in Max to be exported into D3’s .x format. Figured I’d start with simple objects. You know, boxes and what not. I then got an idea… Tetris blocks! I started creating the various tetris blocks and then I started playing around with making simple textures for them. I went through a couple of different texture ideas, seeing what they looked like when up on the dome.

After 4 variations, I finally settled on a texture I wanted to use. Of course, now I had to create different color versions of that textures to go on the different blocks. Still working on doing that at the moment, but it won’t take long. You might be wondering why I’m creating Tetris blocks… me too. I did get bored after all… but on the other hand, maybe I could make a kickass fulldome Tetris musical show.

OgreMax Viewer

We have an idea as to why the textures would not show up (sometimes) in the OgreMax Viewer. When you assign a texture to something, Max is basically saying, “My model is here, now I go get the texture from over there.” The OgreMax Viewer on the other hand, wants the textures to be right there next to the .SCENE file. We think that when the scene is exported from Max, that the link to the textures is somehow lost.

I did 2 tests. I created a simply scene, a plain and a box and gave them textures from Max’s default material library. After exporting, I checked it out in the viewer and the textures were missing. The second test, I copied the textures to the folder that I’m exporting to and applied the textures to the models from there. This time after exporting, the textures were present. I’m going to continue playing around with this to see if there’s another way or that there’s an option somewhere that I haven’t noticed

Exporting from Max to Ogre

I’ve been doing a few test exports out of 3DS Max using OgreMax and viewing them in the OgreMax Viewer. One thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes some of the textures don’t show up in the viewer. Unsure as to the reason for this yet, since I have the textures placed in the folder with the exported .SCENE and .MESH files. Will have to keep experimenting to figure it out.